Urooba Salman (Lahore U Management Sciences (LUMS)) has posted “The Digital Panopticon: How AI has Reshaped Workplace Surveillance and Labor Control” on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This paper seeks to interrogate how artificial intelligence has transformed the exercise of managerial power, labor autonomy, and the traditional and foundational principles of labor law. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theory of thepanopticon and extending it to the modern workplace, it argues that algorithmic systems have created a “digital panopticon”; an architecture of invisible surveillance which disciplines workers through datafication and the fear of surveillance rather than outright coercion. Using insights from labor law scholarship, critical theory, and existing empirical research, the paper demonstrates that AI-based monitoring tools, ranging from productivity trackers and biometric attendance systems to predictive analytics, actually embed control into the very scaffolds of the modern workplace, eroding collective bargaining practices, privacy, and procedural fairness.
This study situates these changes and transformations within the Pakistani context and legal framework, where though the infiltration of surveillance is not so perverse, fragile labor protections, weak privacy and data governance laws, and imported surveillance technologies create an especially fertile ground for exploitation. It conceptualises this phenomenon as “surveillance colonialism,” wherein technologies from authoritarian or unregulated jurisdictions infiltrate developing economies under the guise of modernization. The paper contends that Pakistan’s outdated legal architecture regarding AI and data cannot adequately address such algorithmic decision making, leading to an accountability vacuum and a structural silencing of labor resistance which needs to be addressed before it is too late.